Confusing situation (long)

[Anonymous]

No question, get this out. You might want to invest in a Hot Magnum filter with the vacuum attachment, this will allow you to syphon out the crud without loosing the water.

Yah I've got one of those laying around somewhere. I used to be a rep for marineland...still got all my old demo stuff up in the attic.

-Do you know what level your phosphate is? Also, you may have an iodine overdose going on.
Steve

I doubt I've put enough iodine in there to OD...only added about 1/3 of a bottle of the Kent stuff over the past 6 months or so (and done several water changes in the meanwhile).

Guess I"m gonna have to go buy test kits, eh? Crap, I used to go years w/o testing anything. I didn't even used to test salinity! heh But that was when I had a nice healthy tank and could tell when things slipped from the animals. Never had a situation like this where some things were flourishing while some were dying off.

 

[Lurshy]

The surface floating algae isn't really like cyano. It's thick and gooey and bubbly.

Sounds like dinoflagellates among other things. Do a search. Its been reported that water changes, and siphoning off (like cyano) won't help. Though it sounds like your more concerned with getting the macros going then getting rid of the other...

 

[danmhippo]

Hey, forget about test kits. I used to swear by the additives, Kent Lugol, Salifert Mg, Salifer this and Salifert that. I used to have test kits of all possibilities and even thinking about investing in a ion specific meters for various different chemicals in the water.

I postponed on those and stopped testing the water after I am busy tending my business. After a while, I suddenly realized the tank is doing much better then it was when I was dosing bunch of stuff into the tank and making it a chemical soup.

From then on, I stopped using all additives, even Lugol's. All I rely on now is water change, and Kalkwasser.

 

[Anonymous]

Hey, forget about test kits. I used to swear by the additives, Kent Lugol, Salifert Mg, Salifer this and Salifert that. I used to have test kits of all possibilities and even thinking about investing in a ion specific meters for various different chemicals in the water.

I postponed on those and stopped testing the water after I am busy tending my business. After a while, I suddenly realized the tank is doing much better then it was when I was dosing bunch of stuff into the tank and making it a chemical soup.

From then on, I stopped using all additives, even Lugol's. All I rely on now is water change, and Kalkwasser.

Agreed 100%. I always had the best luck using Coralife salt and no additives whatsoever, mixing with plain old tapwater, running a 4" DSB and skimmer. Now I'm into all this wacky mud and adding iodine and that and I'm up this creek, no paddle, and no map back down. :?

 

[Anonymous]

sharkky:

danm and spc seem to have covered most of the possible basic issues, but i'll add my own .02 anyway :wink:

i'd dump the mm, and replace it w/ oolitic aragonite sb.get the skimmer running-NOW! :wink:

try other types of macro's-like halimeda, merman's brush, etc.

water changes, and good alk and Ca levels should be all you need for good macro growth in the sump/fuge...though, if after the changes you still have problems, i'd try adding a little iron-very sparingly-for the macros-the new sb will eliminate your NO3 issue in a few months :wink:


good luck, and keep us posted!

 

[Anonymous]

Just tested nitrates...down to 2ppm (after the water change yesterday). I'll dig the skimmer down out of the attic tomorrow and see if I can find a pump for it, I guess. Run that over the holiday weekend and see if things improve at all (not that I'd really be able to notice that much of a difference over a span of 3 or 4 days).

I'll keep everyone up on the (hopefully) more successful tank!

 

[Anonymous]

Cleaned out the detritus in the sump last night (although I think more ended up blown out into the tank than ended up getting removed. :roll: ) and hooked up the skimmer. Column of the skimmer filled with water and immediately started producing a nice medium-tan with green foam. So we'll run it for a few days, do another water change when I get home from making the visit-the-families run, and see how things are looking.

 

[Supergenius74]

Hello, im fairly new to reefkeeping but for the last 4 months i have had a 55gal beginer reef tank running and so far everything is fine. I build my own MM refug out of an extra 10 gallon tank and a cheap pump. I admit that i am performing the biggest no-no in reefkeeping, im trying to get by cheap, but I'm also trying to prove it can be done. I have about 3 big pieces of live rock figi/tonga and some brown button polyps, 1 molly that gave birth to about 10 babies that are doing fine and 1 yelow striped moroon clownfish. This is my first salt water tank but i also have a 120 gal fresh water tank and about 3+ yrs of experience with that. Anyways, i have culerpa growing like mad. my nitrite/nitrate levels are good and my amonia is near 0. All other levels are good and the only thing i have had trouble with is my polyps were not opening up all the way due to low light levels, I tried to get by with 2 15 W cheapo flourescent bulbs and it just wasn't enough, i bought a 130 W powercompact smartlight and they are doing much better now. My MM refuge is doing great all kinds of creeppy crawlies in there and all i have is another el-cheapo 12" floresent bulb over the tank that never shuts off. The culerpa is literally outgrowing the tank. I built it by putting 10 lbs of MM in the bottom and a plastic butter container in each end of the tank. One container has about 50 bio-balls in it and some filter media over top where my over flow feeds the water and holes in the bottom and the other has holes drilled near the top and a 300 gph pump in it. My fish are healthy and happy and show no signs of any problems. I got algae, tons of it, brown and green and i just put 2 turbo snails in the tank to start cleaning things up, the algae was getting so bad that it was getting hard to see the fish! anyways the snails have been going to town for the last couple of weeks and things are looking better. I never acclimated anything except the fish and never had anything die yet. I use to work at a pet store part time and my ediquite some times is not as strict as some people's. I have no skimmer and i don't add anything to the tank. I'm sure that once i get into hard corals i will need to but for now everything is healthy. I'm taking this slow and sticking to the "golden rules" of fishkeeping. Sorry fo rthe long post but i want you to see where i am coming from. At our local pet store they had calerpa in the reep tank, not the sump and it was under 250w MH all day but was always dieing, I think it was because it was too deep and the shut the lights off on it. I think it needs to grow in shallow, warm, constant light conditions and you got to keep the water flowing over it for it to work. i only have a 300 gph pump but the refuge only has about 5 gal of water in it so it is replacing the water in there every min. In the begining of my fishkeeping i learned that i was trying to keep the tank too clean and my fish died, too many water changes and no algae, I think algae is kind of a golden rule for aquriums, in fact, when i start a new tank now, i won't put fish in untill algae starts to grow, to me its natures way of saying that the water is ready.I also won't do a water change until there is a reason. Water changes are good and bad in my eyes. Yes they help lower nitrate levels but they also remove alot of things that the tank needs. I keep my water temp at about 78-80 deg and my salinity at 1.025 and I'm very happy with the miracle mud product. The macroalgae is doing great and i have not done a single water change in 4 months. Just some info that may help you.

 

[brandon4291]

I think its neat you have a molly in your sw tank. Ive heard of people doing that, but hadnt talked to anyone yet about it. Id like to have one of the fry to try in my reefbowl...

 

[Anonymous]

Some moron in our lfs recently tried to acclimate a channel catfish to saltwater. Poor thing was laying in the bottom of a tank full of damsels just twitching, its skin sloughing off. :roll:

 

[Supergenius74]

I hate when people don't know how to take care of animals. My molly was already a salt water fish at the LFS and I wanted a hardy first fish to get the cycle started. I posted some pics for everyone to see of my 55 gal reef tank that i am working on. The Do-it-yourself refuge is underneath and it pics aren't real clear because of all my algae, I will take more pics once the turbo snails get things cleaned up a bit. Check out http://www.htmlgonebad.com/shane/ to see, let me know what you think.

 

[nilestr]

Supergenius, I am glad to hear your miracle mud setup is doing great for your cause I just set one up for my new 90 and have my fingers crossed

I really really agree about your feelings on algea.

On my old freshwater 55 I had three oscars doing okay. I ws always scrubbing algea and removing hair algea and doing water changes. The water was semi clear. When I left for college my mom could care less about the fish and just filled the tank from evaporation and fed the fish. That was it. I came back to a totally green tank. I could only barely see the outline of the fish. Then I open the hood and looked in. The tank had never been so clean. The water was crystal clear and the fish were HUGE. I have continued that unconventional way with my saltwater tank and all fish/anemones are healthy and growing like crazy. All I do is add water when it evaporates and scrub the glass so I can see the fish.

I think some of your problem SHARKY is you do too much to the tank. Let mother nature take its course. It eventually finds its own equilibrium.

 

[Anonymous]

I think some of your problem SHARKY is you do too much to the tank. Let mother nature take its course. It eventually finds its own equilibrium.

That's always been my method, too, until this damn tank came along. I've never been this frustrated with the hobby before. :-\ I let it sit for a month or two after each minor change, and nothing seems to improve in the slightest. My newest, last, and most desparate move was to give up on the Miracle Mud and yank it from the sump this past weekend. I know that the tank will be out of any kind of equilibrium it's established now, so I'm going to let it go for a few months to see what happens. I really am at my wits end here. :? Early word is no change, though; at least not after a week. Time will tell, I guess.

 

[bowser]

Aside from everything that has already been said (stop dosing iodine, add a skimmer, remove as much of the gunk as possible), one thing that no one has suggested is running carbon in your filter. A big anemone like that can put out a large amount of chemicals and carbon will help to remove it.
Just a thought.

 

[Supergenius74]

I suggest that you test your water or get new test kits, no algae sounds like a water problem to me, either you are not testing for what the problem is or your test kits are inaccurate. If you took some good water in a container, let it sit in the sun for a while, it will eventually grow bacteria and algae, its a natural process and most of the time aquarists have too much algae or more then they want in their pretty tank. IF you create the right conditions it will grow, In fact i'm finding that the more nitrrate you have in a salt water tank the more algae that grows, its directly connected to that. Miracle mud will not effect algae in a negative way, in fact it should actually help promote it but adding trace elements to the water. Culerpa on the other hand converts amonia strait to nitrogen and doesn't give it a chance to become nitrate, unless you have tons of culerpa or took out all your bio balls and had no live rock i don't see how you could have 0 nitrates. I have a friend and she has well water, she has had a 55 g tank for a while but recently her fish starting getting sick and dieing, I told her she shouldn't use well water for her tank but she doesn't see how water that is ok for her could be bad for her fish, anyway she has no algae in her tank at all and the water is kinda cloudy compared to my freshwater tank, there is something in her water, I don't know what but her aquarium does not like it, Test kits don't test for everything, just the basics and I don't think she knows what all is in her water.

 

[Anonymous]

I suggest that you test your water or get new test kits, no algae sounds like a water problem to me, either you are not testing for what the problem is or your test kits are inaccurate.

I agree, this sounds very much like a water condition to me. Problem is, I think it's something very out of the ordinary, something that doesn't affect fish at all, and only affects some inverts (crabs and brittle stars are just fine, anemone is slightly affected, other inverts not faring well at all). I wouldn't even know where to begin testing for things that aren't covered by standard hobby test kits, much less how to correct the problem.

I do run carbon, but maybe not enough; that's one thing I was thinking about beefing up. Was also going to get a polyfilter just in case there's some sort of heavy metal leaching into the system (I've heard that in some rare cases Miracle Mud can release toxins such as that).

 

[Anonymous]

Just an update...

I tore out the MM a few weeks ago and replaced with a 4-5" DSB of sugar sand (in the sump). Still not much in the way of algae growth, but the button polyps are finally beginning to open up again (4 so far out of a colony of 15). They're small and pale, but then again they've been closed for about 4 months and I'm kind of surprised they're alive at all. The anemone is also opening back up slowly but surely, and accepted a piece of shrimp yesterday for the first time in about 2 1/2 months.

Based on those heartening observations, I went out and invested in a moderately sized colony of green star polyps; the first addition to the tank in about 6 months. They began to open up within an hour or two, and by the time the lights shut down for the night they were all out.

So it looks like the problem may not be solved, but is at least for the moment resolved. Apparently the Miracle Mud was leaching something into the water column that was toxic to only some inverts, but not fish. Interestingly enough, a copper test registered 0, but when I added a polyfilter (at the time of MM removal), it turned blue over the course of a few days.

Unfortunately I'll probably never know the real cause of this, I'm just glad that the tank seems to be back on the mend and I can start thinking about corals again!

 

[Anonymous]

Sharkky:

i'd suggest not adding any new load (livestock) until the sb has time to develop properly and function :wink:

let it do its thing for what you already have in there, first :wink:

 

[Anonymous]

Vitz...

What do you think I am, a noob? ;-)

Nah, don't worry, I'm not going to try to put that school of yellow tangs in there...yet.

Seriously, I know to take it slow. The couple inverts in there were recovering nicely, so I decided to risk the star polyps to see how they did. They seem to be doing good (just got home and they're all out and bushy and thick) on the 2nd day, so maybe in a couple weeks I'll try a small frag or small leather or something. Until then, I'm just glad the tank is happy again! Now I just need copepods.

 

[Anonymous]